05/31/2011
Started getting a headache on drive to work, light and shadows flashing by triggered it. Sadly I did not have any of my Rx’s with me. Took an over the counter, (containing Aspirin, acetaminophen, and caffine) that relieved the headache.
So Saturday concert was pretty fun. The venue was a small club and I had reserved a table for myself. (The sweetie-wife does not care for most of my music and that include Sheena Easton.) I got there early enough to order a small diner before the show, and ended up chatting with the lady at the table next to mine. (She recognized me from thr Vegas show I went to last September.)
Sheena came one and this time I had a very good appraisal of just how tall, or rather how short that lady is. My friends Sheena Easton is a hobbit. However she looked good, in fact she looked better than she did in Vegas, so either I caught her on a bad night, bad lighting, or my eyes were out of whack. This time I was nearly level with her and maybe 15 feet away at most. The set was mostly her big hits, but she mixed it up a bit and added a few songs from lesser known albums.
Afterwards I headed hom and enjoyed a nice desert of donuts since it was a night of my diet.
Sunday was a relaxing day with board and card games in the evening and yesterday my sweetie-wife and I went to the zoo, but sadly no crane chicks yet. (I think when the cranes chicks hatch one should be name Charles Foster Crane.)
Yesterday I even got another chapter of Love & Loyalty edited and tonight I expect I might get two more done. I am now hurtling towards the end of first-pass edits. After that is system integration as I shove the new bits into their places in the script, then a read through to make she integration went smoothly, then a copyedit pass by my sweetie-wofe and then finally beta-readers.
05/28/2011
Awoke with a sharp headache, took 1 dose of the treximet, was dizzy for a couple of hours but headache fully relived.
Even though I have a spot of back pain today has been a fairly pleasant afternoon. My sweetie-wife and I watched a 60’s caper/comedy called Gambit. It stars Michael Caine and Shirley MacClaine, though we were more amused by the three supports all who had appeared as guest stars in the Original Star Trek series. So the caper/Comedy had a god like alien, a mass murderer, and a swindler as supporting cast.
Now I am off to a Sheena Easton concert here in San Diego. Good night all.
At the very least I am a film actor.
Let me explain. My novel, and my short stories, are written linearly I started at the front, write the beginning, then the middle, and then the end. After that I go back and edit and clean up. Deleting bits that didn’t work, tightening passages and sentences until they go from crap and so-so.
What this mean is that the emotion hearts of the scenes are written as they occur. Love and Loyalty has me in some new territory.
I have a list of 13 new scenes that need to be written and inserted to expand the scope of the novel to fit my new vision. They are not being written in a linear fashion. That means one moment I’m writing a tender love scenes between two characters and the next scene is one of characters manipulating and deceiving each other, then to a scene of high-powered politics and office games with dangerous consequences. Emotionally I am being whipped back and forth as I write in a fashion to is alien to me, yet it has not been a stough as I thought it would have been.
I can see the end of the process. (thank god) I so want to push this out to my beat readers and see if this is working as well as I suspect.
I also want to get back to reading novels and to writing them. (I don’t read novels while I write one because if I did better writers would suck up all my time and I would get nothing done.)
So this will be a fairly brief review, the hour is late and I need my sleep.
Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is the 4th film in the franchise inspired by a ride at Disneyland. I’m a big fan of the first film, owning it on blu-Ray disc, but I did not like the two sequels. In my opinion the second and third films suffered from an over abundance of cynicism, while the first film frolicked in its love of fun and whimsey.
This 4th film, while not as good or self-contained as the the first is much better than the previous sequels. The sense of fun has been restored and that alone made this a watchable movie.
It suffers from being a bit long and having a few subplots that were better edited out at the script writing level, and characters that seem to have no real bearing on the story other than as macguffins.
That said I enjoyed the flick, was happy to see it and I may even see it again. I am told by my sweetie-wife it bears little resemblance to the novel that suggested the script. I have the book, On Stranger Tides. It is by one of my favorite authors and I look forward to reading it when I finish my own novel.
I was unable to post last night. A full day at my real job took so much out of me all I could do once I got home was watch Dr Who with my sweetie. (season 5 premier)
Tonight is the Myterious Galaxy Writer’s Group, so my movie review will have to wait again.
Well, the cold/bug that has bedeviled me and my sweetie-wife seems to be abating. She’s going back to work in the morrow and I’m starting to feel well enough to return to my chores and duties.
I am not well enough to stay up late watching movies tonight so there shan’t be a Sunday Night Movie Feature this week. However I will still talk film tomorrow with a brief review of Pirate Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, whihc we saw this morning and enjoyed.
I also hope to return to editing and writing on Love & Loyalty tomorrow. This cold/bug has had me so fogged that I could not think creatively.
Speaking of my writing, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades has been submitting for distribution through smashwords. In a couple of weeks it should be available through all the major eBook sites, Amazon, B&N, Sony, Apple, etc, and today I made it available through Smashwords as a free download for part of their Operation eBook which supplies free eBooks to services men and women deployed overseas. Hopefully I can lift a few spirits and make tedium less tedious.
p.s.
My sweetie-wife has decided to wait until after Worldcon, in August, before getting herself a new pet bird, but I am happy she will get herself another pet. She does love her birds and I miss the little fellow too.
we’re settling in for games tonight. looking forward to fun and keeping our minds of other matters.